Black And White Morality / Live-Action TV

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• Burn Notice, through and through. Westen and his allies are good, his antagonists are always evil. The villains of the week are almost always dog kicking assholes. If that wasn't enough the true antagonists, the shadowy organization behind the burn, has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As for Westen's crew, they are always seen by everyone as perfect and never wrong, even though Westen himself has largely selfish motivations for what he does.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel both play with this. Each starts out as a clear-cut example, but later seems to drift to somewhere between this and Black-and-Gray Morality, with the protagonists usually doing the right thing, but not always, and most of the antagonists remaining dog-kicking villains. Also, despite usually being portrayed as good in the sense that they're well-meaning, the heroes of both shows often encounter situations that are portrayed as morally gray, leading them to disagree with each other on what the good course of action is. A villainous example would be The Judge from Season 2 of Buffy, who kills based on whether a target has humanity or not. Any vampire with sufficiently human traits—like interest in books, or involvement in romance—is a fair target to him, even if they're otherwise serving evil purposes. The 1992 movie that started the franchise, however, is black-and-white all the way (it was largely a comedy, after all).
• Charmed: You are either good or you are evil. Yes, you have to choose and then there's nothing in between. The only ones who don't follow this are the Angel of Death and the Avatars, but they are a class of their own, not something in between. To break it down: witches are good, demons are bad. More specifically, anyone who are allies with the Charmed Ones and they like them, they are good. Anyone else is bad. Even the neutral ones because you can't trust anyone who is neutral. Also, all witches after they first get their powers, must decide if they are good or evil within 24 hours and if they do something evil in that time frame, even if they were tricked into it and thought they were doing good, they are evil for the rest of their life.
• Kamen Rider was like this in the beginning. The Hero is a badass justice-loving, Friend to All Children Cyborg while the villains he fights are a Nebulous Evil Organisation of Nazis and cultists building an army of horrific monsters to Take Over the World and enslave all of humanity with. After the turn of the Heisei era however, the franchise has become more fond of having more morally grey settings, with characters of varying alignments who can't always be neatly sorted.
  • This trope gets deconstructed in Kamen Rider Outsiders thanks to the introduction of Zein, a super-intelligent tyrannical AI that's bent on ruling the world with an iron fist. This puts the villains, former and current, as well as Foundation X on a warpath against Zein, and the only one standing their way are the good guys siding with Zein, who they believe as a righteous Benevolent A.I., to the point that they have no compunctions of doing un-heroic acts to for the sake of a greater good, not helped by Zein refusing to take into account even the morally grey characters. However, Zein actually exploits this trope as an excuse to play its accomplices like fiddles and plans to turn an already Deadly Game into a humanity self-destruction game to trick the entire human race into slaughtering one another. To make matters worse, the heroes' blind faith in Zein enabled its genocidal nature after being misled into believing Zein to be a Greater-Scope Paragon now that it dropped all its pretenses of goodwill, when Zein's actual solution to eliminate malice is to basically Kill All Humans.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit deconstructs this for Stabler in the episode "Nocturne": he forms a rapport with the victim of a pedophilic piano instructor, but later discovers that the victim also abused children himself, at the original abuser's instigation. He finds himself being torn by his hatred of pedophiles and belief that pedophiles abuse because they were abused, themselves, is little more than an excuse, and his desire to help the victim.
• Lost: While it's unclear whether either character has purely good or purely evil motivations, the series has boiled down to an epic, eternal conflict between Jacob, the representation of white and seeming "good guy," and the aptly named "Man in Black," better known as the Smoke Monster, the representation of black and alleged "evil incarnate."
• Subverted by Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Despite his reputation as an example of Incorruptible Pure Pureness, Mister Rogers was adamant that there are no such thing as good people who are good all the time, and no such thing as bad people who are bad all the time. In one recurring song, he tells the children: "Sometimes people are good/ And they do just what they should/ But the very same people who are good sometimes/ are the very same people who are bad sometimes/ It's funny, but it's true/ It's the same isn't it for me and you." While for obvious reasons he rarely showed himself on-screen being impatient or rude with anyone (because he wanted to serve as a role model for children), in his Neighborhood of Make Believe segments, all manner of human foibles (and strengths) are on display. Most of the characters have both strengths and weaknesses; King Friday does try to be a good and fair king, but his subjects sometimes come to resent his bossiness; Lady Elaine Fairchilde is fun and loving towards her neighbors, but she does get on everyone's nerves at time with her recurring mischief; X the Owl is well-meaning and kind but awkward and obtuse when it comes to relationships; Daniel Tiger is quite gentle, but sometimes his shyness keeps him from experiencing all of what life has to offer.
• Enforced in Once Upon a Time where doing something morally questionable, no matter what the circumstances are, will turn a good guys heart black; this only applies to the heroes, however, as the antagonists are more morally complex.
• In Photon, the forces of darkness want to turn every planet in the universe into a barren wasteland. The forces of light are dedicated to helping others and restoring the barren planets.
• Power Rangers and Super Sentai: Rangers and their friends are good; even the shady ones have an excuse: street-level hoods? Stealing to survive and help other homeless! Guy working with the mob? Screwed them all over to help an orphanage of Littlest Cancer Patients! Professional thief? ...Okay, that one was just glossed over, but he's probably one of those guys who's legitimately hired by companies to test security.
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder's Mesogog, while still black, was a particularly grey shade of black, as he is the sole villain of the series to not carry an evil business card. He was a dinosaur hybrid who wanted to wipe out us filthy mammals and restore dinosaurs to their rightful place as the dominant creatures, and so thought what he was doing to be right, although his methods and manner make it dark enough to still be evil. Its grey, but only in comparison to the villains whose goals are stated to be "to be as evil as possible, nyahaha".
  • The grayest Power Rangers villain is Ransik of Power Rangers Time Force. He wanted to take over the world in the present, because in the future, the mutations that result on rare occasion from the genetic engineering process that normally allows for perfect Designer Babies for all are shunned to a degree that would make the mutants of X-Men count their blessings. Ransik's gang is gathered from the homeless mutants. He cackles as much as any past villain whose title is "Your Evilness" when causing mayhem, but he's got a reason for his hate and his motivation isn't simply greed or the evulz like many of the others.
• The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Nemesis" features Chakotay in the middle of this kind of war. The Vori Defenders are handsome, loyal to their friends, determined to avenge their loved ones, and act as Good Samaritan to the alien stranger who's dropped into their midst. They speak in a poetic manner evocative of a medieval fantasy, and fight to defend their homeland from the monstrous Kradin who commit atrocities For the Evulz. Subverted to hell and back-the Vori are using brainwashing to convince him (and probably their own people) of this. The Kradin help rescue Chakotay, and Janeway confesses she has no idea if the Kradin commit any atrocities, but they accuse the Vori of the very same ones they themselves are accused of.
• Stranger Things: This seems to be how morality is portrayed in the first season. In the second season, the characters become more developed and human, making it more Morality Kitchen Sink.
• Supernatural: In the early seasons, this is pretty much played straight with Sam and Dean killing monsters of the week that are unambiguously evil, whether it be a demon, angry spirit, or vampire. As the series goes on, morality is significantly muddied with Sam and Dean engaging in ends-justify-the-means behavior often and some monsters turning out to have moral compasses of their own. They meet a group of vegetarian vampires being hunted by a fanatical human, they meet a werewolf who is so horrified by her actions that she tearfully asks Sam, who loves her, to kill her and Sam and Dean themselves start to do things like make deals with demons. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of episodes where Sam and Dean and Castiel face an unambigiously evil monster and defeat it.

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